Early Warning

“I teach eighth grade at a private school.”

“Do you ride anymore?”

Debbie shook her head.

“You should. You were so game, and I made you do lots of things that most girls would have been scared shitless to do. I am scared shitless just thinking about them.”

Debbie laughed.

“So what is your cute brother doing?”

At first Debbie thought she meant Dean, and she said, “He graduated from Dartmouth in the spring, and he’s—” But then she realized, and she said, “Oh. Do you mean Tim? I didn’t realize you knew him.”

Fiona said, “How could I not know the cutest boy in school?” She looked blank, innocent. Debbie licked her lips, and her eyes filled with tears. “He was killed in Vietnam six years ago.”

Fiona went white.

It was funny how it all rolled back through you, how you relied on everyone you knew knowing that your brother had been killed, had had his skull pierced by a grenade fragment, and so you never had to say the words or think the thought, because every time you did, it was too fresh to tolerate, if only for a minute.

Fiona twisted her gloves in her hands and said, “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.” She looked down. “Did he ever tell you that he used to”—she paused—“he used to give me rides sometimes in his car?”

“I never knew what Tim did.” But had Tim somehow been Fiona’s boyfriend? This idea was so impossible that Debbie couldn’t process it, and therefore decided not to.

But the tears now in Fiona’s eyes spilled down her face. She brushed them away with her hand, and then she said, “I do have to get ready for the next class. The horse is pretty green and takes a lot of warming up.”

“I’m glad I saw you.”

“Me, too,” said Fiona.

She turned and walked down the tunnel toward wherever they kept the horses.

Debbie made her way back to her seat and sat quietly for the next two classes, but she didn’t see Fiona again, even though she was in the program, on a horse named Restless. There was no explanation or announcement. With the traffic, Debbie was home by midnight, and she lay awake in her bed until four, wondering if they had ever really been friends, she and Fiona, or if it had always been the way she sometimes saw among her students — the one girl, Fiona, the dedicated, oblivious rocket heading into the future as fast as she possibly could, and the other girls milling about her, locked in the day-to-day contest for position and love. Which would you rather be? Debbie thought. And yet there was the picture in her mind of that chestnut horse, airborne over the Liverpool, his forelegs folded, his neck stretched, his ears pricked, Fiona crouched on his back. As with every arc, she knew, there was a moment of weightlessness in there. Once you felt it, you were doomed always to long for that feeling again.

1973

JANET THOUGHT that Marla Cook, who moved into their house after Liza went to live with her boyfriend, looked exactly like Cicely Tyson, but she knew perfectly well that you weren’t supposed to talk to black people about how they looked or discuss how they looked with others. There were a lot of land mines there, because, even if you came from a family where only your grandparents ever used the word “Negro” (no one in Iowa that she had ever heard used the other “n” word), there were plenty of words that you had to be careful of, like “boy.” When she was (and it was rare) feeling fond of Richie or Michael, she would say, “You are a cute boy!” And then, one day in Oakland, when she was talking to Hunter Morrison, who was about the same age as the twins and worked with her at Lasagna Paradise, she laughed and said, “Oh, you are a cute boy!” and that was that. They were both so embarrassed for her that they never joked around again, and yet she couldn’t apologize.